About - Abhay

Hey there, I'm Abhay. Welcome to my digital garden! This is a little place for me to jot my thoughts down and share some cool stuff I come across.

I'm a CS sophomore at The University of Texas at Dallas and will be interning at Google this summer.

I'll tell you a bit about me and my background.

Okay, maybe not just a bit, I like to ramble...

Origins

In 9'th grade, I began learning Japanese intensively using the AJATT method. This method relies mainly on consuming native content, but also encourages the use of software to improve the workflow.

I started leveraging tools Anki, a spaced-repetition software, to augment the language acquisition process by cementing vocab in conscious memory before it becomes unconscious memory. I was an avid daily user, but more importantly this was the first tool that really struck a chord in me to think more creatively about software and its applications to life.

The more tools I started getting acquainted with, the more I started to realize the glaring inefficiencies in my workflow. At the time, the one that stuck out like a sore thumb was the painstaking process of converting raw sentences I "mined" from native material into rich Anki flashcards. 1 hour of mindless copypasting every day! This had to change.

This was my doorway into the deep rabbit-hole of programming and open-source. I picked up Python and managed to hack up a CLI script that automated the flashcard creation process. Every time I ran it, my jaw dropped. A few hundred lines of ugly Python code literally just saved 365 hours per year!

Since then, I was absolutely resolved to get better and better at software development to create tools that can directly improve the quality of life of myself and the people around me. In the theme of Japanese-learning, I went on to develop several other projects, including a cross-platform Japanese OCR, Android popup dictionary, Youtube-to-Anki plugin, hard-coded subtitle blocker extension, and many more.

Partially out of nostalgia, I completely revamped my first flashcard generator script 3 years later, into a full fledged Rust CLI with dozens of features + Chinese support.

In the end, the heart of my motivation started off and continues to stem from building open-source projects that make life easier.

Getting my feet wet in the startup world

As you could probably tell, I'm all about trying to build stuff that solve people's problems. There's simply no better satisfaction as a developer.

For the longest time, I was hopping back and forth between different projects, but never really arrived at an idea that I had a burning passion, all while staying dedicated in the long-run.

But I knew I was growing more and more product-minded, and started to enjoy the other parts of building products — designing, talking to users, market research, community building, etc.

Fast forward to March 2025, where I started building Readspace with my cofounder Enkang Yuan.

It's an AI-powered reading and retention platform designed to help people truly absorb, retain, and apply what they learn.

Why? The answer is simple.

I love to read. From computer science to history or philosophy, I believe reading is the best way to grow and develop perspective in this world.

But here's the three biggest problems that most of us face:

We just forget way too damn fast.
We're way too inefficient with traditional learning methods.
Staying motivated is hard when learning isn't tailored to us.

To avoid keeping this absurdly long, check out our website to see how we're solving this!

Technical Interests

Now there's the other side to the hacker.

The desire to grow and dive deeper into the technical weeds of one's craft.

I strongly believe in the balance of "useful" and "curiosity" projects — achieving this sort of hacker nirvana. You can expect a post on this soon!

Lately, distributed systems and scalable architecture has been an exciting topic for me to dive into. The problem of scalability, an inevitable problem for all tech startups, calls for some very clever engineering.

The work of open-source organizations like Apache in this space of core infrastructure-level software is fascinating. Contributing to ground-breaking open-source projects like Apache Flink is a strong goal of mine that I'm working towards.

On the other end of the CS world lies deep learning and its applications in NLP and CV. Of course, the world right now is almost revolving around LLMs, but there's just something about processing massive loads of data into game-changing tools that excites me. There's also a beautiful intersection between scalable engineering and machine-learning, which is a topic that I'd love to further dive into.

You can check out my other website documenting my ML journey. It even features a solid roadmap for you to get started!

Linux & Homelabbing

Important to note: I use Arch Linux btw. Jokes aside, Linux has seriously changed the way I view computers, and has significantly helped with boosting my productivity. Some software that I use on the desktop includes hyprland, waybar, neovim, tmux, zsh, alacritty, zen, obsidian, and more.

Checkout my dotfiles for my setup.

I love messing around with my homeserver — mainly a Dell PowerEdge R720 running Proxmox. I host several services in LXC containers with Nginx Reverse Proxy, PiHole, and Tailscale as a secure way to remotely access them. It also acts as my NAS, running TrueNAS with Raid-Z2 ZFS setup on some SAS storage. Stay tuned for a post introducing my homelab in-depth!

If you're curious about my PC specs:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7800x3d
Motherboard: ASUS B650-E AM5
GPU: Nvidia RTX 3090
RAM: 32GB DDR5
Monitors: 2x Dell G2724D (2560 x 1440 & 165hz)
PSU: Corsair RM850e
Case: Fractal North (wood & mesh)

Outside of CS

Further touching on my language learning origins, I continued to learn Japanese intensively throughout high-school for around 3.5 years to a relatively high level.

During 12'th grade, I started the next chapter in my language learning journey by getting into Mandarin Chinese, and have been learning it (using the same AJATT method) ever-since. While there wasn't a single reason that made me start, the rich history, culture, literature, philosophy, that the language unlocks was definitely appealing.

To avoid becoming glued to the chair, I've been incorporating weight-training and long-distance running into my life, supplemented with a largely whole-foods plant-based diet. I truly believe that one's mental state is directly correlated to one's physical state and that both are need to complete one's life.

You can reach me on Discord @ kamui_ajatt or the following ways: